The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement and Its Expected Effects on World Trade

Intereconomics - The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement creates the world’s largest free trade zone. The agreement has the potential to increase trade relations among its...     

A tale of two Italies: ‘access-orders’ and the Italian regional divide

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the ‘access orders’ paradigm developed by North, Wallis, and Weingast [(2009). Violence and social order: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] to analyse the case of the Italian North–South economic divide. In line with their framework, we collect and discuss several social and political indicators over the long-run, at the regional level. Firstly we looked at data on the pre-conditions for the establishment of an open-access order, such as murders per capita (a proxy for control over violence), voting turnout and referendums participation (proxies for political legitimacy), and the impersonality of exchange. We then showed evidence of different access orders in the North and in the South, using the information on human capital formation, women participation in the labour market, and referendum results. On the basis of this evidence, we argue that, despite being part of the same State and subject to the same formal institutions, the North of the country progressively developed into an open-access order, while the South remained a form of limited access order.

Institutional differences are linked to specific aspects of the economic performance of the two areas, thus the ‘access order’ paradigm appears to be an effective conceptual scheme to explain the North–South economic divide.     

State-owned banks in the market for corporate control

We study the pre-deal characteristics of state-owned banks acquiring other companies, relative to their private counterparts. We build a unique international data-set of 3682 deals in the years 2003–2013. Econometric results highlight that those state-owned banks that are acting as acquirers have an ex-ante performance similar to their private benchmarks. The results are driven by the role of development banks. This new finding points to the recent evolution of some types of contemporary state-owned financial players.     

Investor protection and value creation in cross‐border M&As by emerging economies

Previous research investigating cross‐border M&As (CBM&As) by emerging economies (EEs) provided contrasting evidence on the value enhancement role of investor protection rules. We conduct a new empirical study to address the issue with an accurate sample selection of bidders from more homogeneous developing countries and transactions on developed countries only. Our analysis over the 1997–2012 period on a sample of M&A deals by companies from Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) does not provide evidence that better institutional standards in the destination country are rewarded by the local stock market. We find that foreign governance quality is not associated with positive excess stock returns around the announcement date. Rather, these returns are affected by firm‐specific and deal‐specific factors, such as the relative deal size, the listed status of the target company, and the acquirer size. Comparison with other studies on excess returns for emerging markets (including BRICs) suggests that the results could be driven at least partially by country choice.     

Telecom reforms in the EU: Prices and consumers' satisfaction

The paper shows the impact of privatization and liberalization on consumers in the telecommunication sector for 15 EU countries. Policy reforms are summarized by the OECD regulatory indicators (REGREF) that consider the extent of privatization, vertical disintegration, and market entry. After controlling for other country variables, first, a test of the impact of ownership and regulatory changes on consumer prices is given. In the second step, the Eurobarometer data on consumers' satisfaction about quality and prices of the telecommunication service are considered. The analysis confirms the importance of market regulation in reducing prices but minimizes the role played by privatization per se. Overall, the findings offer only mixed evidence, and somehow contradict, the hypothesis that all the reforms work in a similar way across the EU countries.     

Anticipatory algorithms for same-day courier dispatching

This paper describes anticipatory algorithms for the dynamic vehicle dispatching problem with pickups and deliveries, a problem faced by local area courier companies. These algorithms evaluate alternative solutions through a short-term demand sampling and a fully sequential procedure for indifference zone selection. They also exploit an unified and integrated approach in order to address all the issues involved in real-time fleet management, namely assigning requests to vehicles, routing the vehicles, scheduling the routes and relocating idle vehicles. Computational results show that the anticipatory algorithms provide consistently better solutions than their reactive counterparts.     

Patent pools,vertical integration,and downstream competition

Patent pools are commonly used to license technologies to manufacturers. Whereas previous studies focused on manufacturers active in independent markets, we analyze pools licensing to competing manufacturers, allowing for multiple licensors and nonlinear tariffs. We find that the impact of pools on welfare depends on the industry structure: whereas they are procompetitive when no manufacturer is integrated with a licensor, the presence of vertically integrated manufacturers triggers a novel trade‐off between horizontal and vertical price coordination. Specifically, pools are anticompetitive if the share of integrated firms is large, procompetitive otherwise. We then formulate information‐free policies to screen anticompetitive pools.